1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Internet searches and more specifically to geographical information based search restrictions.
2. Related Art
Searching for information on the Internet is a very common activity that requires the use of a browser capable of retrieving information from a website. In such an operation, a search website is accessed and search terms provided by a user by typing in search terms in a free form text format. A search engine receives the search terms and retrieves results. During most of the search operations that are performed using current search engines, geographical information is not used as part of the search. Therefore, search results are returned that include information on products and/or services that may be available only half way around the world, which are not very useful to a user. People desiring to locate a store or a service using the search engine typically want to find results relating to products and services that are geographically proximate. However, most information produced by the search is devoid of information regarding “proximity” to a user.
To address this problem, some search engine produce maps that directly show locations of businesses having web pages produced by the search. Often times, though, a large list of search results are generated and displayed on a map on the client device's screen resulting in a map that is cluttered with markers corresponding to the search results. Further, the businesses identified on the map may only be partially relevant to the search. In the few map based search engines that are currently available, there is no means to control the items that show up in a search list in terms of the proximity to the user's current location. There are no means to facilitate control on the arbitrary size of the search region by which a user can systematically partition a large search area on the map and do the search operations, systematically on the world map.
With current search engines, a search region may be selectable only to a certain extent for a predefined area or a location such a city, a state, or a country, for example. Often search results identify service providers or stores that do not really exist in the region where they are purported to conduct business. Often, when searching for stores in a city, business and web pages show up during a search that are thousands of miles away from the city of interest.
Online maps often provide zooming functionality. User's areas of interest may be zoomed to a possible extent and the details of locations for businesses can be selected and visualized. If the area or the location of the map is too large and, also, if the user is not aware of the topography of the area, it will be very difficult or confusing to zoom on a particular street and pick a desired business firm's premises. In other words it becomes difficult for the user to pick exactly a small location from a predefined large area or location. In this process, the location a user is searching for cannot be resolved properly to select the required ones, mostly when there is a lot of clutter within a small search region of the world map.
In a search operation using current search engines, the user has no control, or at best, a limited control, of the search result output for a given search string. The search results presented to the user is in the order of the relevance of the webpage to a user entered search string or on the basis of the popularity of the website. This criterion built into the current search engines are not always the best ones. For example, if a user is looking for a restaurant in a nearby place, the search results are provided in a distance-wise order of the physical address of the restaurant from the current location of the user. Often the restaurants located are not related to the user's location, or are located elsewhere but still show up in the search results.
There are huge number of Internet squatters and scammer who try to push their business illegally on the Internet. Their web links get indexed by search engines as are other legal and authentic websites and are produced during the search, confusing or misleading the user into picking an appropriate search item from the search result list. Current search engine have no effective algorithms or techniques built-in, that can either warn or block sites that are related to Internet squatters and scammers. Because of this shortcoming, the Internet has become a haven for illegitimate businesses and scammers. Resultantly, legal and authentic businesses lose their business to scam artists. Current search engines fail to test and block unauthorized or illegal businesses. Search engines simply have no control of Internet squatters and scammers.
Current search engines do not have any built-in techniques that can determine the current GPS (Global Positioning System) location of the user and mark it on the world map, or use it for searches. In that case, user often has no clue on his current location in an unknown remote city, and can guess at best. Therefore it is hard to find, for e.g. a coffee shop, even though he is able to find some coffee shops that show up on his laptop during a search. This is due to a lack of an ability to incorporate GPS coordinates (longitude and latitude in angle) in searches, which is a serious drawback.
Many current search engines generate redundant search results, which appear as search results simply because they are relevant to the search string. In some cases users are interested in performing a search based upon the correlation of a search string with titles of sought web pages, not on the basis of correlation of the search string with web page content. Because most search engines correlate search strings to all content of searched web pages, most of the search results are unusable or irrelevant because relevant web pages do not appear high in the search results. Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.